She stopped talking, and in the silence heard a door bang, and a car change gear as it went along the street. By keeping the gas fire on for long enough the room became warm. Persistence paid off. A carton of broken Christmas crackers lay in a box outside a stationer’s and, acting the born scavenger, she brought them back, trapped one in the cupboard door, and pulled. The thin crack was like breaking the strand with home.
She took off her coat, and cleared rubbish from the floor. Thrift and cleanliness would get her back to reality. She would eat little, live on minimum heating, fit herself into one small room, and make her clothes last for as long as was decent and reasonable. Lacking nothing, she was optimistic, but to be occasionally careworn and frightened only intensified her hours of solitude. She did not need ice-box, television, car, house, wardrobe, garden, tea and dinner services, and a hundred other things that had previously walled her in.
Why had it taken so long to find out? The lowest-paid job would allow her to go on living in this way, sitting in front of the heat when she came home from work, with curtains drawn to keep out cold and the world’s noises. On the Underground an advertisement for traffic wardens offered fifty pounds a week, work she could easily take on. If George’s family came to London in their cars to look for her, or go to the Soho strip-clubs, she would plaster their windscreens with parking fines.
Safe in her room, she recalled a secret of George’s brothers which she didn’t doubt would never worry them. When their mother lay dying they crowded into the front parlour to make their last goodbyes. Alf took a hand out of his mackintosh pocket to wipe away tears, staring at the wall as if his grief would break it down. Bert’s look of bitterness, the closest he could get to panic, suggested he was about to be robbed of the only prize that had ever meant anything. ‘Don’t go, mam,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t go.’
‘She ain’t going anywhere,’ Harry said, hoping nevertheless that she would not.
Alf’s terror was buried so deep that he became scathing towards whoever threatened to prise it loose: ‘You’ll frighten her to death, you silly bleeder!’ he called across to Bert.
Up to this point they had felt themselves to be young and indestructible, but now saw that at least part of their world must sooner or later come to an end, and that so must their own. Betty and Maureen, afraid to stay in the parlour, were making tea and cutting bread in the kitchen to feed their kids.
Maud’s eyes opened. Pam wiped the sweat with a paper towel, and wondered how much she saw while babbling the names of her sons as if they might do something for her. They had taken her teeth in case she choked on them. Pam’s mother had died, and her father the year before. She held Maud’s cold hand, and felt her own tears start when the old woman stared. Within the bush of grey hair her face seemed to be receding.
The others hung back. Should they come near, Maud might take them with her. Their hearts would go black and they would die. Superstitious horror pushed them away. But she wanted them to approach, though only Pam could hear her say so. George grasped his mother’s hand, but his brothers were terrified that such grief would tear their stomachs to shreds should they let it catch hold. They could no more get close to her than they could to a house on fire.
She tried to raise herself, still muttering their names, as if the appearance of her sons and daughters would prevent her slipping into that endless tunnel of darkness which she felt was opening behind. They could do nothing. She knew them as too much like her long-vanished husband who had always been the worst of men to her. They took after him in even the smallest part, she had told Pam. The last gesture to remind them of what she had once been was a brief smile.
It was a movement of the lips that quickly passed, and which no one else saw. But the smile, if such it was, almost crushed Pam’s heart with the intensity of its bitter irony, and the emptiness of expectation which was felt almost as a relief compared to the disappointments she had suffered. The two flows of expression merged to become the last grimace of a dying woman who had let the male predators so often drag her down that she had lost all spiritual contact with normal morality. With that smile she had regained it, but at what a price. She lay back on the bank of pillows, her hand in Pam’s becoming colder as she closed her eyes.
Yet Pam willed her not to let life slip away. She had tried the same with her father, but to no effect, though just in case dying could be prevented she was again impelled to fix a similar concentrated strength of body and soul to keep Maud from death if only by a few minutes. She spoke, but in silence, pleading with Maud not to leave them in desolation. Maybe her father had had an extra hour of peace and was eternally happy with it, unless he had been too clouded in mind to know, which must be the state of all the dead, if they were in any state at all. And now she kept Maud alive, or seemed to, for her eyes opened, though it was hard to say how much she saw. Perhaps she wouldn’t die as long as Pam begged her with an intense love, tears being part of her prayers.
Someone kicked at an ankle, and she turned at the eruption of a private quarrel or resurrected grudge, to see Bert put a brass candlestick from the sideboard into his overcoat pocket.
Alf jabbed his foot out. ‘That’s mine. I wanted that.’ Not getting it, he reached to the shelf for a trivial seaside souvenir and a heavy metal ashtray.
‘You grab-ailing bastards.’ Harry opened a drawer, clutched a box of cutlery under his coat. She now knew why they wore overcoats and mackintoshes on a warm spring day. They couldn’t trust each other to share Maud’s bits and pieces in a civilized manner. She wanted to scream at them to stop their looting, but she would alarm Maud whose hand stirred at the noise.
The brothers’ wives and sisters, hearing the signals, came from the kitchen with plastic bags. They tried to be quiet (she had to say that for them) but they couldn’t refrain from the occasional shove and cry over a choice piece. On the other side of his mother’s bed George was undecided as to whether or not he should take something to remember her by. As if, she thought, one needed objects to recall a person. But George was, to his credit, as transfixed by their movements as she was, and knew that he would be pushed aside as being the youngest who deserved the least if he made any such move. Because their mother was dying they were in a mood to manhandle him in a manner which would be speedy and vicious, due to the risk of one of their number snatching something on the sly should the process be too prolonged. And they would have said: ‘What do yo’ want ote for, greedy bleeder? Yer’ve made a bigger pile than we’ll ever make, no matter how hard we wok. So fuck off, and let us tek everything.’
She kept hold of Maud’s hand, telling her to rest and be in peace. She wanted a miracle, that she would wake up healed and asking for a bite to eat. The eyes were open, looking at familiar objects being taken out of the room.
‘She’s still living, can’t you see?’ Nobody heard, and Maud cried through her, but Pam would say no more, willed into silence because words lost their value as Maud closed her eyes for the last time, perhaps glad to be rid of them. Pam kissed her, and put her hands under the blanket, feeling even colder and smaller than the corpse, as if there was no fire left to draw breath that struggled at her diaphragm. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said to George.
‘Soon,’ he answered, choking with loss.
One daughter said she was going to tell a woman up the street to come and lay her mother out, but she returned in triumph with a death certificate from the doctor so that she could claim the burial allowance. The three elder brothers leaned against each other roaring with grief, and shed tears that scalded so much they evaporated almost as soon as they appeared. Bert, embracing Harry to soothe the anguish they both undoubtedly suffered, felt into his brother’s capacious pockets so as to pick out a coveted object, but Harry noticed the sly hand and told him to eff-off, pushing him away so that a real fight began which Alf and George finally stopped.